I send a semi-daily email delivering insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated. It is called The Heretic and here is the dispatch from 2012-12-15:

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LINKING MISSION TO STRATEGY AND ACTION

One of the fun perks of my new role at Mozilla is to think about how we can explain Mozilla better — and in the process engage more people in what we do and believe.

Mozilla is a mission-driven non-profit — our mission can be found here and is supported by our manifesto. With a broad mission of “promoting openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web” we often run into the question of what’s in and out of scope? What should we do and what shouldn’t we do? What is the main thing and how do we make sure the main thing is the main thing?

You run into this exact problem in every startup. There are just so many opportunities. So many directions to take.

Tim O’Reilly recently wrote a great blog post about a model which Jennifer Pahlka from Code for America uses — a simple pyramid model which links mission to strategy to programs and activities. It’s wonderfully simple — and makes, when applied to Mozilla, everything very clear.

I’ve created a quick, rough and pretty raw video to explain the process — have a look: